Out of the wilderness

Roy Kerridge

In the town centre of Cleveland, Ten- nessee,nessee, there is a square with a fountain and a little gazebo, as the people call it, a pavilion where open-air marriages take place, with much waving of balloons. Near- by stands the Wildwood Church, which has a purely negro congregation. One steamy Sunday night I was taken there by West In- dian friends, and my arrival caused a small ripple of surprise. (`Mama, that's a white man."Hush, child.') Nevertheless I squeez- ed into a pew beside a rather blowsy woman with several lively children and waited for the service to begin.

`Welcome Br'er, welcome Sis,' boomed the preacher, a big bespectacled man who stood by the door. When the church could hold no more, the service began with a song. Beside me, the children played with toys they had brought with them. Soon a wild rhythm filled the small wooden building. A line of solemn heavily-built men faced us, with rows of women behind them, all standing on a theatrical stage facing the tiers of pews. One song followed another, and the congregation joined in with their tambourines. Each spiritual consisted of repetitive chants, often questions and answers varied by sudden changes of tempo controlled by the drummer. Tension built up, and so did the note of tragedy and deep, haunting sorrow. This is also evident in English West Indian churches, but not on such a passionate scale. Some of the dark, wild-eyed, wild-haired young women seem- ed to me to show traces of Cherokee Indian in their ancestry, with their curved noses and high cheek-bones. Cherokees owned negro slaves at one time.

`Ain't you glad you've come out of the wilderness?' a light-skinned girl of gypsyish beauty screamed again and again in a soulful wail.

`Guess I am! Guess I am!' replied the bass men solemnly. This went on for some time, encouraged by the congregation, who jumped in their seats with cries of `Yes, Lord!' and `Sing it!'

`Come on, children. . . I once was blind but now I see. . . Aint you gla-a-ad you've come out of the wilderness?'

This was followed by an eloquent but ter- rifying sermon on the Last Days, which not only frightened the West Indians, whose sermons take a less coherent form, but seemed to alarm the gypsyish girl herself. Her eyes grew larger and larger and she bit her nails. Fortunately it appeared that the Saints would be taken up to Heaven long before `the Tribulation'. Fortified by this knowledge, the girl and the choir recovered in time to sing `I Feel Like Travelling On' and `It Is Well With My Soul', which in gospel language became `It is we-ay-ay-ay- ell with my so-oy-oy-oy-oul'. One Brother grew so excited that an African bird-god appeared to possess him, and he performed a frenzied arm-flapping dance, to tam- bourine rhythms that were much faster than in West Indian churches.

Afterwards we piled into our bus, while the main congregation, brightly dressed, stood in the light drizzle of a hot Southern night, around the white-painted church porch, talking loudly and happily. In the beam of car headlights I could see several well-dressed children running up the steps and sliding down the banisters, giggling and tumbling.

African elements in such services may have combined with Christian fervour, for frightening the believers plays a large part in West African pagan religion, as do rhythm, dancing and spirit-possession. There are 'black churches' and `white churches' within single denominations in the American South today, but there is also a tradition of mixed worship, through which Africanisms have become part of the evangelical tradition. It would be ironical if strict fundamentalists had cast out all vestiges of `Romish idolatry' from their ser- vices, only to admit the gods of Africa in their stead. To some Pentecostalists the end of Christianity is not a life of kindness and self-sacrifice, but the 'baptism of the Holy Spirit' or gift of speaking in tongues.

Nevertheless, the impact of Christianity on the American negro, from the earliest days of slavery to this day, has been so pro- found as to form a miracle story for our times. Planters well knew that a knowledge of the Bible, coupled with the ability to read and write, would give slaves an insatiable appetite for freedom. More than that, it would provide them with the very concept of Freedom itself. For it took Bible reading, and the identification with the Children of Israel in Egyptian bondage, for the slaves to make sense of their predicament.

Mungo Park, the young Scotsman who explored the Gambia in the late 18th cen- tury, noted that among African tribesmen there were three slaves to every free man. He described hunts for runaway slaves, with horses and dogs, that would not have been out of place in ante-bellum Alabama. Both hunters and hunted were negroes. He saw a bad-tempered African dig a shallow grave, drag the body of a nine-year-old slave boy up to it and fling the corpse inside with a contemptuous cry of `Waste of money!'

Slaves sold to the Americas believed that they were going to be eaten, for were not all white men cannibals? They were relieved to learn that they would merely do farm work,

as many of them had been doing for their, masters in Africa. Their white masters

religion and power over letters and figures fascinated a hybrid jumble of captives whose legends and languages could not sur- vive the first generation. Kind-hearted out- siders and occasional slave-owners gave the odd Bible-reading or school lesson. Most masters, however, strictly prevented their slaves from attending Christian services. The song 'Steal Away to Jesus', still in the Wildwood repertoire, was hummed along the cotton rows as a secret message for the field hands to steal away to a sacred grove in the woods at night to hear the Word of God read by a secretly literate slave. From the merest hints, the Bible story, with Moses and Jesus as principal characters, came as an overnight revelation to the black South.

Now their condition was changed. In a sense they were free already, for now they knew it was wrong that they were slaves. The Bible story had made sense of their chaotic world, and henceforth they would look forward to their deliverance, praying for it and singing for it, whether the freedom was on earth or as it is in Heaven. Christianity not only comforted them in captivity, it told them of justice and in- justice, and that a sin that cried out to Heaven could not endure for ever. Shades of meaning overlapped between the freedom each would know in death and the earthly freedom God had promised in the future.

'Oh mourner, you shall be free!' sang the optimist, to be answered by an ironical refrain, 'Yes, when the good Lord sets you free.'

Nevertheless they prayed, they were freed and after much tribulation, here they are, glad to be out of the wilderness. At the start of the 19th century, white people debated among themselves whether slaves should be Christian or not. Fifty years later, captive in body alone, the negroes had made Chris- tianity their own. They were quick to see the disparity between the Christianity of the Gospels and that of their masters, and declared the latter to be false. Masters themselves, impressed by the absolute faith of the Christian slaves, often felt in superstitious awe of them. Convinced that they were spiritual inferiors to the negroes, they begged for prayers for dying relatives in the Big House, or for the South to win the Civil War. When freedom came, it was a disappointment for many patron-less negroes.

'Looks like we kind of expected something from freedom,' a former slave remarked, after Old Missy had him driven from her door.

The Klan and the prison farm overseers did their best to reintroduce slavery by the back door. Martin Luther King, his authority established in the Bible Belt by his martyr's death, freed not only the negroes but the minds of Southern white people. In Cleveland, Tennessee, there were racial disturbances in the Sixties, but none since King's tragic death. Now white people can be Christians too.

Strange though, it may seem', I have to report that relations between white and

coloured in the tiny corner of the American South that I visited are better than they are in England. The two races have their own churches and various clubs where a light or dark skin would occasion some surprise; but in public places, parks, shops and cafeterias, they greet one another with unfeigned delight. Children play together, though not roughly enough to crinkle the charming red and white party frocks of the negro girls. Although old people find it slightly harder to mix than do the under- forties, I overheard, during a long bus ride South, a gnarled white man in dungarees talk in a most unaffected way to a coloured mother and daughter who were also bound for Georgia.

'Yes ma'am, me and my seven cousins are all straight off the cotton patch . .

The pleasure with which the races con- versed seemed to me to be one of discovery. For years each side had wondered what the other side was like, and now they were finding out. Cleveland's true centre, I discovered, was not around the fountain and gazebo, but in the Mall, an air- conditioned shopping precinct some way out of town. Negro women here had a distinctive style of dress, very tropical in a Spanish-Creole kind of way, with red straw hats with wide, stiff brims, ribbons and airy balloons of muslin on their shoulders. Open-faced men wore pale blue suits, and children ran in and out of the shops, the teenagers singing cheerfully as they sauntered, 'Aint gonna work no mo', no mo' — ain't gonna work no mo'.'

Queueing at Morrison's Cafeteria ('Man, now we're gonna eat') proved a good way of getting into conversation. Talk could be renewed as we sat down at tables laden to breaking point with fried ham, sweet potato, turnip greens and hominy grits ('them grits is pure hominy') with apple dumpling for pudding. Southern food was out of this world, and instead of the sandwiches-in-cellophane of English self- service counters, I gazed in disbelief at vista upon vista of water melons, peaches, strawberries, haunches of beef and potatoes swimming in butter. Many coloured people seemed touched at my interest in them, and addresses were exchanged and vague invita- tions given. England, with its muttering, self-righteous, old age pensioners and de- fiant youth seemed a long way away. Socialism and race hatred belong together, for what was slavery but a kind of socialism, the abolition of money and the direction of money? In Morrison's Cafeteria, as long as my travellers' cheques held good, I felt I was in the Land of the Free.

'We come from the flatlands of Pied-

mont, not from round these yere mountains at all . .

As my companions spoke, pronouncing 'yet' as `yir and 'get' as `git', I searched their kindly weatherbeaten faces. On the whole, American negroes seemed bigger than West Indians, and the men were heavier, with deeper voices. Instead of go- ing bald, as old West Indians and Englishmen such as myself tend to do, their hair remained, frosted white by the autumn of years. As many of the women straighten- ed their hair, it looked odd to see a dark face and large, lugubrious eyes topped by white hair done up in a bun. One lady I spoke to worked as a cleaner, another as a beautician who invited me to her shop for a shampoo.

The gypsyish singer at Wildwood Church proved to be well known, and a girl of 12 recognised her from my description at once.

'She is a bee-yutifui singer! No way am I gonna miss her at the Jubilee tonight, no way! I'm going, going, gone! Jubilee tonight at Wildwood don't end till mid- night, and we'll have a good time, y'all, I'll tell you!'

How far have the negroes of Tennessee come out of the wilderness? On the town buses I was very often the only white man among the cheerful throng, so cars were evidently not owned on an all-American scale. Such negro houses as I could find were ugly brick council flats (or whatever), two storeys high and with skips in front of them. Set among wooden plank houses for poor but rumbustious white families who sat on porches facing small lawns, talking loudly or playing guitars, these flats have probably replaced similar negro dwellings; more's the pity.

My brief stay confirmed the popular view that America is a country of businessmen, who introduce themselves with their occupation as a handle ('O'Neill, mining engineer'). Negroes, no doubt with two or three million exceptions, have not so far ex- celled at business anywhere in the world. In America this means that they are a trifle out of step with the rest of the country. Vulgar trade is not for them, nor do they forsake the comradeship of buses for the selfishness of motor cars. People after my own heart, in fact. White Southerners too are princes among Americans, with their flowery, embellished speech, never saying 'Yes' if they can say 'It most certainly is'.

From what I hear of some white Califor- nians and New Yorkers, it would be a pity if negroes gained equality with them. One day a 'fully integrated' negro generation may look back with nostalgia for the old days, seeing their once-fought-for condition only as a loss. For this reason, negro politics in England and in America seesaws between demands for total equality and for total separation. What the answer may be, if there is an answer, I do not know. All I know is that the South is improving daily, with a happy atmosphere that we in England would do well to emulate.

Now pass me the hominy grits, y'all; I'm going to eat.